


Following Ghosts

by Nevanna



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:38:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: Wendy is slowly discovering the secrets of her town, and realizing that they might explain biggest mystery of her own life.





	Following Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This story fills the "lost and found" square for the Ladies Bingo amnesty period. It covers a most of the first season and a sizeable portion of the second, wrapping up shortly after "A Tale of Two Stans."
> 
> My thanks to my friends on Tumblr for the headcanon about Shandra and Tambry's family relationship.

As soon as she climbs out of the van and approaches her house, Wendy can hear her brothers arguing from inside. The three of them turn out to be sprawled on the living room floor with an enormous blueprint of a tree house, squabbling over where to put the water slide.

Wendy greets them with hair-ruffles and shoulder-punches. She climbs the stairs, which are lined with years of family pictures (and the spaces where a few pictures had been taken down), and closes herself in her room to think about hauntings. 

She wakes up after midnight, and, for the first time in almost three years, tiptoes down the hall and peers silently into the boys’ rooms to make sure that they haven’t gone anywhere. The sound of father’s snores reassures her that the rest of them are still together, at least for now.

\--

“Morning, Wendy!” Mabel chirps, poking her head into the gift shop.

“Hey, kiddo.” Wendy opens a new box of puma shirts and starts fitting them onto hangers. “What’ve you got planned for today? Any more ghosts need busting?”

Mabel giggles. “You’re asking the wrong twin.”

“You guys do stuff like that often?”

“It’s not always ghosts,” Mabel informs her. “Sometimes it’s gnomes. Or zombies, if you believe Dipper’s journal, but I’ve never seen one of those. What about you?”

“What?” Wendy shakes her head. “Nope. None of the above, until last night.”

“But you’ve lived in Gravity Falls your whole life, right?” Mabel frowns. “And you’ve never seen anything spooky?”

“Hey, Wendy!” Stan Pines bellows from the other room. “Am I paying you to sell T-shirts or chat about nail polish with my niece?”

“As if,” Wendy mutters. She squeezes Mabel’s shoulder. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

\--

Wendy can’t remember a time when she and Tambry didn’t know each other. They used to spend their summer days building sand castles by the lake while their mothers gossiped, or battling imaginary monsters in the woods, or planning their Summerween adventures. That, at least, hasn’t changed. 

“So, how do you feel about having a séance at the party?” Tambry asks as they wait in line for their ice cream.

Wendy frowns. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“We can contact whoever we want. Murder victims, rock stars, pirates…” Tambry glances at her sideways, and the name hangs unsaid in the air between them. “Pick someone.”

Instead of saying it, or protesting for the hundredth time that _we don’t know if she’s really dead_ or turning around and stomping out of the store without a word, Wendy points out, “We should probably be careful what we summon.”

Tambry makes a noise of disbelief. Her fingers fly over the keypad of her phone. “Status update: Wendy Corduroy preaches caution. W… T… F.” She doesn’t quite smile, but her voice contains a few more inflections than usual. “You have to admit, that’s alarming.”

“Dude, it’s not as alarming as a bunch of pissed-off ghosts,” Wendy reminds her. “Remember the ones that attacked us in the Dusk 2 Dawn?”

Tambry’s heavily black-lined eyes flick back to her phone. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Is that some weird local legend your boss made up?”

“He didn’t have to make anything up,” Wendy says. “Not this time.” 

\--

It’s a few weeks later, in a chamber underneath the local History Museum, when she finds out why her friend was confused.

Plenty of things make Wendy angry, and she doesn’t care who knows it. A few things scare her, and she’s a lot less likely to share those. When she hears what the Society of the Blind Eye has been doing to her town, she isn’t sure if she’s more frightened or furious.

When Fiddleford McGucket tells her and her friends to “fight like a hillbilly!” she doesn’t need to be told.

\--

Tambry’s mom answers the door in her pressed pantsuit, with traces of studio makeup still on her face. She must have just returned from the station. “Hello, Wendy!” she carols.

“Hey, Shandra. Is Tambry ready?”

“She’s in the shower. Why don’t you come in and wait?”

Once they’re seated at the table, and she's poured them each a glass of water, Shandra’s TV-personality smile falters. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here early. I wanted to find out how you’re doing.”

“Well, I didn’t have to work today, so we…” The Mystery Shack is still a wreck from its most recent cage match with the unexplained. Shandra doesn’t know about _that_ somehow, does she? At this point, Wendy doesn’t want to make any assumptions. “I’m okay, I guess,” she says, more cautiously.

Shandra leans forward. “I know we’re coming up on the three-year anniversary.”

Wendy stares over her meticulously dyed and sprayed head at the kitchen that’s as familiar as her own, as familiar as the story of how Frances Corduroy and Shandra Jimenez had met while working at the local TV station, years and years ago. They’d remained each other’s closest friends until the day that Frances went on a hiking trip and never returned.

“If you had any idea what might have happened to her,” Wendy says, “would you tell us?” She wants to believe that the answer is yes, but she knew – even before Soos kept her awake half the night recounting the story of Mr. Pines and his mysterious twin from another dimension – that adults keep secrets for all kinds of ridiculous, well-meaning reasons, assuming that they even have a choice.

“I have the same questions that you do, sweetie,” Shandra says with a sigh. “Even if we ever find out the answers, we’ll still have to decide what to do with them.” They both hear the thud of heavy lace-up boots on the stairs, and she whispers, “I’m always here if you need anything, okay?”

The monsters in the woods are real, and Wendy has no proof that one of them took her mother from her, but she doesn’t know that they didn’t. Somewhere inside herself, she might be afraid of the answer, but she’s not afraid to look for it. “Thanks,” she says. “I think we’ll be okay on our own.”


End file.
